Restaurants across the city are bracing for immigration raids, a day-one promise from President Donald Trump who has vowed to crack down on immigration and deport millions of undocumented immigrants without constitutionally required due process. The deportations build on similar policies pushed by the first Trump administration in 2016.
The fear is acute for street vendors, 96 percent of whom are immigrants.
“Vendors are already incredibly vulnerable given the nature of their work, serving our city from public sidewalks,” said Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, deputy director of the Street Vendor Project.
What makes them especially vulnerable is that in New York City, vending without a license can be prosecuted as a criminal summons or a criminal misdemeanor rather than as a ticket or a civil liability, which puts vendors at risk of deportation if they encounter police.
Many street vendors have stopped working altogether, for fear of getting picked up and deported. The City reported earlier this week that only 52 percent of the nearly 1,200 people taken in by ICE on Sunday were considered “criminal arrests.”
As the still-working vendors take their place in carts across the city’s frigid concrete grid, chats about ICE sightings begin at daybreak. The messaging groups, set up by the Street Vendor Project, are in languages that span the globe and reflect the diversity of the city’s street vendors — including French/Wolof, Spanish, Mandarin, English, Arabic, and Bangla. They were first created to share helpful industry information but are now also used as a way for vendors to keep one another informed when ICE comes calling.
The January uptick in ICE raids follows the October initiative from Mayor Eric Adams, who launched the 90-day “Operation Restore Roosevelt.” That particular street vendor sweep was stated as an effort to mitigate prostitution and sex trafficking and increase public safety in the Elmhurst, North Corona, and Jackson Heights neighborhoods of Queens. But street vendors selling food who could not get a vendor permit were also affected, with their carts hauled off on garbage trucks. Nonprofits and many in city government have been critical of how the initiative affected street vendors.
“We have been waiting almost a year for answers to basic questions about the Adams administration’s efforts to issue licenses in accordance with the law,” comptroller Brad Lander said. ”So far, we’ve only seen chaotic heavy-handed enforcement.”
Since the beginning of the new Trump administration, Kaufman-Gutierrez has been encouraging vendors to identify and befriend nearby standalone businesses that have a private area as a place to go and hide. The organization is also facilitating court accompaniment, encouraging its at-risk members to create family plans for their children in case of an interaction with ICE and to prepare a list of medications, allergies, and other important details to share with their emergency contacts.
The first local ICE raids since President Donald Trump took office began last week at a fish wholesaler on January 23 in Newark where both undocumented workers and U.S. citizens —- including a Puerto Rican military veteran — were detained without a warrant. Lawmakers including Representatives Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and Pablo José Hernández, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, have already called on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director to address the wrongful detention by ICE agents in New Jersey.
Since then, federal immigration officials raided Bronx Terminal Market and other locations. According to reports, at least four people were picked up, though it wasn’t immediately clear how many people had been detained in raids at two or more Bronx locations and one in Washington Heights.
“There is a lot of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty in the restaurant industry right now, particularly since the raid in Newark,” said Andrew Rigie, president of the NYC Hospitality Alliance. “Most owners see workers as part of their family and they are very concerned that they may be deported. All people want to do is live their lives and run their businesses, and it’s a horrible way to exist.”
How criminalizing street vendors breeds fear
Advocates stress that street vendors have already been under attack by the NYPD for “quality of life” crimes and for vending without a license — a system that Adams promised to fix by expanding the number of permits a year. The administration’s effort has been routinely criticized, even by mayoral candidates, for being too slow and limited.
“The Mayor’s initiatives to target and overpolice street vending in our city are an example of how he has chosen to criminalize our communities, disproportionately harming people of color, including increasing the risk of deportation for immigrants of color,” said Yasmine Farhang, director of advocacy at the Immigrant Defense Project.
“I ask people to think about how many times a day you interact with immigrants, said Natalya Aristizabal, deputy director of Make the Road. “I would imagine more often than not it is a positive interaction because most of them work in service roles. To vilify immigrants is to simplify immigrants, and I ask people to approach them with more humanity.”
Proposed changes on the city level
While most advocacy for immigrant workers is taking place on the federal and state levels, the Street Vendor Project has a crucial package of legislation at City Council that would help protect immigrants by expanding access to licenses and permits to all street vendors, bringing street vending out of the shadows and into the economy. The proposed legislation package would also reduce the criminal liability on vending so vendors cannot receive misdemeanor charges for violations.
According to the Immigration Research Initiative, 75 percent of mobile vendors are forced to work without a license because of the city’s outdated cap. “Street Vendors are forced to live in a shadow economy paying brokers for licenses ($18 to $30K for two years as opposed to under $1000 for two years under the city license) or risk heavy fines and potential criminal summonses for vending without a license,” said Kaufman-Gutierrez.
What’s more, street vendors are subject to the whim of police officers who decide whether to issue vending violations as civil or criminal summons. That said, regulation of Street Vendors is not under the purview of the NYPD; rather lead agency enforcement is in the hands of the Department of Sanitation, a distinction advocates say the police blatantly ignore. Kaufman-Gutierrez says that “one of the most inconsistent policies in NYC is its street vending enforcement.”
According to reporting by the City, the NYPD issued just over 1,500 criminal summonses to street vendors between January and September of last year, surpassing the 1,244 it gave out in all of 2023.
“The number of criminal summonses against vendors is climbing higher and higher,” said Kaufman-Gutierrez. “This type of harsh enforcement can quickly ensnare vendors and have much more drastic consequences on New Yorkers who are at risk of deportation. What at-risk vendors are facing with the Trump administration is more dangerous, but it builds upon, and is facilitated by, the city’s existing criminalization of these small businesses.”
The package was introduced in February of last year: Kaufman-Gutierrez noted that legislation can take a few months to over a decade to get to a vote. Advocates hope the time has finally come for it.
“City Council must take urgent action to enact policies that protect New Yorkers against Trump’s mass deportation agenda — at a speed that matches the urgency their constituents are experiencing.”
